Ask five agencies to quote the same website and you will get five numbers that look unrelated. The reason is that almost nobody is quoting the same scope, and the brief rarely says enough for them to.
What actually drives the price
Number of unique templates, not pages. A forty-page site using six layouts costs far less than a twelve-page site where every page is designed individually. Repetition is cheap; uniqueness is not.
Whether content exists. If text, images and product data are ready, the build proceeds. If not, someone must create them, and that is often the largest line item. Content is also the most common cause of a stalled project.
Functionality beyond information. A brochure site is one thing. Bookings, payments, logins, calculators or integrations with other systems are each a small software project.
Design originality. Adapting a template, customising heavily, or designing from nothing are three different amounts of work.
Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, ERP, booking system or payment provider is usually underestimated in every initial brief.
Rough categories
Template-based, self-assembled. A few hundred euros plus your own time. Fine for validating an idea. Limited, and it usually looks like what it is.
Small custom business site. Several thousand euros. Custom design, a handful of templates, content structure, mobile, basic SEO foundations.
Larger business site or simple store. Higher four to five figures. More templates, more content, e-commerce or integrations.
Complex store or web application. Five figures and upward, depending on how much is genuinely custom.
Our base website with five core pages in one language costs €2,400 one-off, including 19% VAT. The legal notice and privacy policy are added free from your ready texts and do not count towards the five; additional pages, other services and packages are quoted individually. Below that we cannot deliver something we would put our name on.
What cheap options really cost
A very cheap site is not fraud — it is a smaller scope. What you typically do not get: original design, content help, performance work, accessibility, SEO foundations, or anyone answering the phone in eighteen months.
The expensive outcome is not the cheap site. It is paying twice, because the first one had to be replaced, usually with the added cost of migrating whatever visibility it accumulated.
Ongoing costs to budget
- domain, annually
- hosting, monthly or annually
- SSL, usually included
- maintenance and updates
- content changes
- any licensed extensions
A site with no maintenance budget becomes a security problem within about two years.
Getting comparable quotes
Give every agency the same brief: what the site must do, how many distinct page types, whether content exists, what it must integrate with, and your timeline.
Then compare what is included, not just the number. A quote that excludes content, testing and post-launch support is not cheaper — it is smaller.
Why do quotes differ by so much?
Different scope, different seniority, different assumptions about who provides content. Ask what each includes and the range usually narrows dramatically.
Is a fixed price possible?
For a well-defined scope, yes, and we prefer it. Open-ended discovery work is better handled differently.
How long does a site take?
Four to six weeks for a straightforward business site with content ready. Longer for stores and complex builds.
Market models and our own prices, kept apart
The ranges above describe the market. Our own terms sit on one page: the base website costs €2,400 one-off including 19% VAT, ongoing SEO support €600 a month including 19% VAT with a three-month minimum term, hosting and domain €36 a month including 19% VAT, billed six months in advance. The Standard and Extended development plans are priced excluding VAT, have their own scope and are not the same thing as the one-off project. Whether website copy is included generally depends on the contract; our base website includes the website copy, which we write from your answers to our questionnaire. In our calculator, the answers Base website · Five core pages · Standard · Flexible show exactly €2,400; every other combination shows an orientation range, and anything beyond the base scope is quoted individually. Services and pricing · Website design and build · Website maintenance